Time wastes too fast

As she lay dying at 34, Martha and Thomas Jefferson wrote a passage from their favorite novel: Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy.

[by Martha] Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen. The days and hours of it are flying over our heads like clouds of a windy day never to return...

[by Thomas] and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, every absence which follows it, are preludes to the eternal separation which we are shortly to make!